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MUSIC; The Ever-Expanding Legend of Wilco

SLOWLY, improbably, unwillingly, Wilco has become one of those bands that stands for something. Too many things, perhaps. If you believe the myths, Wilco is a band so adventurous that a major label cut and ran; a band so prescient that it recorded a beautiful album about 9/11 -- months before 9/11; a band so great that it coaxed half a million boomer listeners out of retirement.

Wilco's breakthrough album, ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,'' was released in 2002, and its success birthed a small industry. There was ''I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,'' Sam Jones's reverent documentary. Greg Kot has just published ''Learning How to Die'' (Broadway Books), a loving biography of the band, and this fall the band is to release ''The Wilco Book,'' advertised as a ''visual analog to the band's music.'' Alan Light has named Wilco as one of the bands that inspired his new magazine, Tracks, devoted to ''Music Built to Last.'' (And aimed, one presumes, at listeners who already have.) Fans of Wilco's singer-songwriter, Jeff Tweedy, could keep busy with the self-titled 2003 album from his side project, Loose Fur, or his book of poetry, ''Adult Head,'' published earlier this year. And on Tuesday, Wilco is to release ''A Ghost Is Born'' (Nonesuch), its wildly anticipated and -- why wait any longer to say it? -- stunning new album.

If you're a bit suspicious of the Wilco cult -- an army of earnest listeners, inordinately proud of their own middlebrow tastes -- don't worry, you're not alone: Mr. Tweedy joined the Wilco backlash long ago. And so this new album is yet another evasive maneuver, intended to frustrate listeners who don't share Mr. Tweedy's belief that detours are as important as songs. More visible than ever, he has made the most self-effacing album of his career.

There's a moment early in the Sam Jones documentary that shows the way Mr. Tweedy keeps himself just out of his fans' reach. ''Yankee'' hasn't been released yet, and he is suffering through an exquisitely awkward backstage meet-and-greet. A fan asks what the new album is going to sound like, and Mr. Tweedy mutters something about how the music is full of ''holes.'' He tries to explain himself: ''Open spaces between what's supposed to be, like, the music.'' He's not connecting. ''I dunno,'' he says -- by now everyone's uncomfortable. Finally, he sees the exit and ambles toward it: ''I'm gone.''

Long before he was terrorizing boomers with 11-minute noise compositions (more on that later), Mr. Tweedy was helping to popularize one of the most conservative rock 'n' roll movements of the last few decades. He made a rootsy racket with his band Uncle Tupelo, which borrowed from old country records to create an early version of the back-to-basics style that would come to be called alt-country, or y'allternative. Uncle Tupelo broke up in 1993 and Mr. Tweedy formed Wilco, and at first it seemed he was content to satisfy his listeners' hunger for sturdy traditionalism.

Then Wilco's universe started expanding. A 1996 double-CD, ''Being There,'' was grand, bleak, woozy: it began with a six-minute collage that went from chaos to a piano ballad and back, until Mr. Tweedy was shouting, ''I'd like to thank you all for nothing at all!'' The 1999 follow-up, ''Summerteeth,'' was even more perverse, full of breezy, infectious tunes and miserable stories -- the songs oozed and ahhed. In Mr. Kot's book, Mr. Tweedy claims that the album's blissful sound was a form of self-protection: ''I felt I needed to bury those lyrics safely under glass.''

Along the way, Wilco also energized its base by collaborating with Billy Bragg on two albums of Woody Guthrie covers, but it was the band's fourth proper album, ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,'' that turned its name into a rallying cry. The album is full of noisy interludes and transitions that sound like so many cobwebs, and Jim O'Rourke, who mixed it, found subtle ways to make instruments slowly disintegrate and materialize, so that the music is slowly but ceaselessly mutating. This approach matched Mr. Tweedy's songs beautifully, but it didn't quite match the expectations of Reprise Records, which released the band from its contract, at which point the myth-making machine really got going.

To Mr. Kot, Reprise's decision is emblematic of all that was rotten in the music industry. ''Learning How to Die,'' an invaluable but infuriating book, is in large part an allegory: Wilco stands for all the small, pure-hearted bands who are trying to save music, and Reprise stands for all the big corporations trying to kill it. In a world dominated by image-conscious entertainers like Jennifer Lopez (who's adduced more than once as an example of all things impure), Mr. Tweedy is ''all about the music.''

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This is the way many listeners have been trained to think about Wilco, and it's a minor miracle that the band still sounds good in the face of all this reactionary rhetoric, so eager to divide the world into Tweedys and J-Los. I love ''Yankee,'' too, but if we absolutely have to pick sides, I think I'll join the multiethnic horde on the dance floor.

''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot'' was eventually released by Nonesuch, which was known, Mr. Kot writes, ''for putting out beautifully packaged, pristinely recorded albums that found an audience the old-fashioned way: through word of mouth, with an occasional assist from National Public Radio and the more adventurous Triple-A commercial stations.'' Ah yes, ''the old-fashioned way,'' when rock 'n' roll fans would sit around the campfire listening to ''All Things Considered.'' There must be something about Mr. Tweedy's strained and battered voice that makes fans nostalgic -- sometimes indignantly so -- for an imaginary past.

To his credit, Mr. Tweedy is too difficult, too diffident to be an effective cult leader. And if ''Yankee'' was a monumental album that sounded as if it were crumbling, ''A Ghost Is Born'' is even harder to pin down. Mr. Tweedy loves to write couplets that hint at boldness, then retreat in ambiguity. One of the most famous couplets from ''Yankee'' promises passion, then backs off: ''I would like to salute the ashes of American flags/ And all the falling leaves filling up shopping bags.'' (These words were often cited by reviewers who heard the album in the context of 9/11.) In ''I'm a Wheel,'' a short, sharp song from the new album, he takes this strategy one step further, shouting out a cryptic slogan and then turning it into nonsense, like a sheepish schoolchild declining to repeat his dirty joke: ''Once in Germany someone said, 'Nein!'/1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9!''

This is what makes Mr. Tweedy's music so seductive: he carefully takes apart what he builds, until you can't be sure anything was there at all. Unlike ''Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,'' which was largely patched together at the editing deck, ''A Ghost Is Born'' was mainly recorded live, with a slightly different lineup: Mr. O'Rourke plays on every song but one, and the music sounds a bit more shivery without the cozy keyboards and guitars of Jay Bennett, who was sacked before ''Yankee'' was released. The result is an album that's both emptier and ruder: during the slow-motion R & B throwback ''Hell Is Chrome,'' Mr. Tweedy's cranky guitar solo arrives all at once, splintering the serenity; during the 11-minute ''Spiders (Kidsmoke),'' the band spends most of its time hammering away at a Spartan, Neu-inspired groove -- it sounds as if they're trying to erase themselves.

Maybe they are. ''A Ghost Is Born'' is, in part, the story of a man who wants nothing more than to dissolve -- to dissolve into his lover (''Oh, it's O.K. for you to say what you want from me''), into his songs, into ''the gray fountain spray of the great Milky Way.'' Near the end there's a painfully quiet lullaby called, ''Less Than You Think,'' on which the man tries (and fails, naturally) to argue himself out of existence: ''Your mind's a machine, deadly and dull/ It's never been still and its will has never been free,'' he mumbles. (The song's lyrics also appear, slightly modified, in Mr. Tweedy's poem ''The Black Hours.'') Soon everything fades away, replaced by a gentle wisp of hum and feedback that gets less gentle, more insistent, more invasive.

It would continue for 11 minutes if you let it, but of course you don't -- eventually you lose patience and skip ahead to the next and last song. I think that's the idea of the hum: Mr. Tweedy wants to force his listeners to cut him short, to shut him up. It's a clever way to undermine overly reverent fans.

The last song on ''A Ghost Is Born'' is ''The Late Greats,'' a short, fuzzy ode that celebrates the pleasures of obscurity while slyly sending up Wilco's own cult status. Mr. Tweedy pays tongue-in-cheek tribute to an imaginary band that's completely unsullied by the corrupting influence of the music industry: they're ''so good, you won't ever know/ They never even played a show/ You can't hear 'em on the radio.'' But then the joke transforms into something more bittersweet: ''The best song will never get sung/ The best life never leaves your lungs,'' he sings, as if he's finally learning that you don't have to escape to disappear -- he's dissolving into himself.